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Transcript
Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Professor Tom O'Regan Director, Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies Griffith University Queensland, Australia http://www.gu.edu.au/centre/cmp/ Professorial Lecture 26 July 2001 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Contents Introduction.............................................................................................. 1 The problem of “too much culture”............................................................ 2 An aesthetic system meets a “way of life” ............................................... 2 Cultural diversity.................................................................................... 5 Towards a continuum of cultural production............................................ 9 Cultural Development—Sustainable Communities ................................... 13 Cultural planning and place .................................................................. 13 Cultural planning as sectoral rethinking and coordination....................... 16 Cultural industries/creative industries.................................................... 18 The problem of “too little” culture........................................................... 23 Industry development and cultural development .................................... 23 International Treaties............................................................................ 25 Convergence and mega-mergers............................................................ 26 On too much and too little culture............................................................ 28 Implications for cultural policy studies..................................................... 30 References.............................................................................................. 32 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Introduction Both “cultural policy making” and the academic area which has sought to make sense of the relation between culture and government, “cultural policy studies”, are at the cross-roads. Cultural policy making faces a number of important challenges and is being transformed in ways which are increasingly in others hands. On the one hand it is a victim of its own success in convincing governments, firms, movements of the central importance of culture. Culture is becoming too important a field—socially, culturally, economically—to be left up to cultural policy making institutions. Embraced by increasingly diverse actors, their priorities are transforming cultural orientations and principles to serve both broader and more specific interests and agendas. In this process cultural policy making institutions are being partially eclipsed. On the other hand, cultural policy frameworks and cultural practice areas risk marginalisation on a number of fronts. Social and cultural policy objectives in broadcasting and film policy are being seriously questioned under the pressure of industry development and market liberalisation agendas, technological developments and trade treaties. Logics of cultural participation are pushing towards an “equality of treatment to an array of different cultures” and cultural forms (Bennett, 2001, 50) further eroding the “high culture system” and unsettling funding priorities and rationales (DiMaggio 2000). The growing and intensifying scrutiny of cultural funding is pushing alternative business models for symbolic activity in which culture is being considered as just another business and cultural workers encouraged to think of themselves as small-business entrepreneurs and new venture developers (Banking on Culture 2000). Logics underpinning cultural production support are being challenged as new industry development agendas are emerging—based on “emerging industry” notions and competitive city frameworks within which “creativity” is central but not necessarily the continuum of creativity cultural policy making has traditionally covered. The focus on innovation and industry development, information and communications can sometimes characterise cultural development policy frameworks—as “old” not “new” economy frameworks. The two movements are related. The adoption of cultural policy notions in an array of areas is leading to their transformation, differentiation and fragmentation, in what is becoming an increasingly complex cultural field. This is inevitably challenging cultural policy frameworks. Advances in 1 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither policy in one area necessarily cut across policy making in another. While some of the challenge to cultural policy frameworks is foundational, under closer inspection most do not undermine cultural rationales—but they do undermine the instruments currently delivering those rationales. There is certainly an international crisis in arts funding with political agendas for reducing governmental cultural funding outlays in evidence across the English-speaking world and beyond (Canadian Conference of the Arts 1998; DiMaggio and Pettit 1999). But we need to recognise that this “crisis” is actually in the words of Paul DiMaggio (1987a, 2000, 51), an American sociologist of culture who I will be relying extensively on in this lecture, “a crisis of growth, attributable to dramatic expansion both in the size of existing organisations and in the number of arts organisation”. In this professorial lecture I want to explore this dual movement of embracing and challenging cultural policy frameworks. My purpose in doing so is not to provide a new mandate for cultural policy or cultural policy studies but a more modest attempt to specify the grounds on which its rejuvenation might be discerned. The problem of “too much culture” With culture leaking beyond its previously restricted domain, cultural policy is as much being made outside as inside cultural policy bureaux. Any exploration of this problem must begin by recognising what we are doing when we set about developing cultural policies. As Virginia Dominguez (2000, 23) notes it “implies that there is an arena of life to which it refers that is separable from other arenas for which there might be other types of policies”. It means setting up a cultural domain. This cultural domain is what is becoming increasingly blurred. It was not always so. An aesthetic system meets a “way of life” What we think of as the cultural policy domain was initially reasonably restricted to the “traditional high arts” in various schemes of subsidy for cultural producers and cultural organisations. Culture meant here the creative arts and what a cultivated person possessed—the capacity to discriminate so as to appreciate the best that has been thought and written. Firmly rooted in the high culture system and its perceived value arts policies were initially conceived within the interstices of this system’s symbolic boundaries between fine arts and good music on the one hand and the 2 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither “degenerate” products of commercial culture” on the other (DiMaggio 2000, 47). The democratising impulse that inevitably accompanied the governmentalisation of “arts” initiatives from the 1950s to early 1970s in Australia and elsewhere was fundamentally about bringing these arts to the people—albeit modified and made relevant to Australians by being Australianised (see Rowse 1985, 67-79, Coombs 1981; Coombs 1969, 59). When cultural activists appeared before the 1962 Vincent Inquiry into Australian content on television they argued and the Vincent Committee accepted their argument that television could serve a useful cultural policy purpose of stabilising the performing arts, particularly theatre, by providing employment of personnel who could, in their other (more important) performing arts careers continue to contribute to Australia’s cultural development. This agenda for the democratising of the cultural sphere centred on the development of cultural policies that were intended “to overcome barriers to cultural access [to the high culture system] based on relations of social class and gender” (Bennett 2001, 32). While governments initially supported this agenda as part of their education planning and later on the basis of the intrinsic merit of these forms, they also supported them through accepted governmental logics for intervention. There was a real failure on the part of the market system to produce these “merit” goods. The instruments for meeting this failure were programs of support for artists or arts, usually performing arts, organisations. When film became an important cultural policy priority in the late 1960s at the Australian Council for the Arts it was supported on multiple bases (see O’Regan, 1996, 31-4). At one level it did not compromise the high arts system: through film festivals and repertory circuits film was an art form, perhaps, the art form of the 20th century including as it did several art forms in its production. But another level it did. Film was firmly situated as a national cultural matter—it was about self-respecting nationhood. It was about representing Australia to everyday Australians and to the world. Authors of this Australian Council for the Arts report—Barry Jones, Peter Coleman, Ian Jones and Philip Adams—were clear about the instruments: commercial filmmaking needed to be established, volume of production was a necessary but insufficient condition for quality, educational investment was required in the shape of a film school, and there needed to be a steady stream of art-house films (Australian Council for the Arts 1969). 3 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither In a sense the ground had been previously prepared by the idea of a national theatre promoted from the late 1940s and its results, particularly, high profile plays such as Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. There was also the availability in other comparable countries of film support mechanisms justified via the “arts” matrix and logics of market failure. But in another sense film was a significant departure for a cultural policy making institution. It was an arts-based cultural intervention into a “popular” entertainment pastime justified by national cultural purposes of identity formation, cultural affirmation and cultural entitlement of Australians to participate in the 20th century’s quintessential art form. Arts policy was becoming a cultural policy. Culture was being conceived as more than aesthetic culture. It was about our way of life. Cultural policy now meant more than policies towards the arts. Furthermore it was about “industry” development as the priority became to create a “fillum” and television production industry. And this was couched in logics of cultural development—the target being the formation of a confident national cultural sphere and the “place making” priority of giving Australia a “part” on the world stage. The “culture” of cultural policy was acquiring an anthropological definition. It was starting to mean that something that all societies must possess by definition. What Alan Ryan summarises as “the congeries of beliefs, values, and attachments that give those societies their character, and allow their members to makes sense of their lives” (Ryan, 1998, 63). Cultural policies now served several related and unrelated governmental purposes. These moves brought arts policy closer to the related but separate field of broadcasting. There had been the acceptance in Australian broadcasting policy from the 1930s of public support for the “national” (nation-building, educational, civilising and Australian consciousness raising) role of public broadcasting first in radio and then in the 1950s for television through the ABC. From the 1950s Australian content regulation first in radio and then television (Allen and Spencer 1983) developed. Initially supported as an employment provision content rules developed over the 1950s and 1960s into an instrument for securing a reasonably significant Australian cultural presence and reflection in the central entertainment and information media of broadcasting. With film policy, broadcasting’s social and cultural objectives and art policies making’s aesthetic and cultural objectives were being brought into a relation albeit through the two distinct though related orders of cultural and 4 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither media policy. Cultural policy was increasingly thought of as a shared activity among broadcasting, film policy and arts policy-making institutions: the Australia Council, the various film bodies, the national broadcasters and the various broadcasting regulatory authorities. Since 1970 there has been a gradual working out of the consequences of adopting an anthropological definition of culture and a continuous adjustment of “the high culture system” in relation to it in arts policy making. In the beginning the “anthropological” definition justified both the retention and extension of the high arts system and its limited pluralising to include “new” forms—in this case film. It also immediately gave rise to various innovations based on these more expansive cultural definitions. These were the “community” based innovations based on logics of “cultural democracy” such as community cultural development and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts frameworks of the Australia Council (Hawkins 1993). These were later supplemented by multicultural arts, regional and youth arts frameworks. Parallel to and connected with these new initiatives was the establishment of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in 1980 with a multicultural mandate. Others (including me) have written about the uneven uptake of these ideas and sectors within the Australia Council and broadcasting more generally and I do not want to go into it here (see Hawkins 1993, O’Regan and KolarPanov 1993). What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that these new areas were based on logics of (encouraging) cultural participation and entitlement of citizens of varying capacities and orientations. It also needs to be noted that with the exception of SBS the development of these initiatives came out of the cultural policy sector and its institutions. Cultural diversity In our contemporary moment we are seeing the further extension and development of instruments based on anthropological definitions of culture. An important vehicle for this has been the concept of cultural diversity. It has “pluralised” both our conceptions and our instruments for cultural development. Under a “democratic” cultural policy framework concerns are expressed for “the ways of life of all the different groups in a society” (Bennett 2001, 17). The cultural activities of different social orders— classes, ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, regional and rural peoples, youth, aged-people, women—become available for cultural policy activism. 5 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Cultural and media policy makers progressively needed to take greater account of these orders as part of their daily calculations. Cultural diversity policy making not only gives rise to rhetorics of entitlement to cultural participation on the part of various marginalised groups, but also to affirming, developing and maintaining identities. Cultural policy was unevenly moving from “national identity” formation to supporting identities constitutive of the national formation. Such cultural policy making was a comparatively minor feature of 1970s arts policy making. In the 1980s separate “orders” or spheres of activity developed which were only partly connected with and certainly not funded at “mainstream” levels. In the 1990s it became an increasing priority to connect this emerging sense of entitlement and identity to the mainstream of arts practice. The “creative arts” were being challenged to reflect cultural diversity priorities and interests in their own programming and audience development agendas. A number of examples will suffice here: indigenous culture became the basis for two major performing arts companies—Black Swan Theatre and Bangarra Dance Theatre; the Australia Council encouraged cultural organisations to both better connect with audiences from ethnic communities (Migliorini, 1998) and to see it as their business to connect the arts with diverse Australian social and cultural orders—women, men, rural, inner-city, suburban, the primary, secondary and university educated, the blue collar, white collar and professional, migrants and the Australian-born—through its promoting the value of the arts research and advocacy initiative (Constantoura 2000). More recently cultural diversity policy making is moving away from thinking about separate ways of life and identities and instead emphasises “flows and crossovers between cultures and their patterns of intermingling” (Bennett 2001, 17). What now needs attending to is the “restless cultural mixing that now characterises developed cultural markets”. This is a concern with governing differences. Bennett, Frow and Emmison (1999, 247) usefully call it “managing the relationships between the increasingly diverse ways of life that make up civil society”. There are two important and not entirely coincident dimensions to this cultural mixing. The first has a preeminently civic dimension embodied in Australia in the reaffirmation of multiculturalism as a policy of state in 1999 by the National Multicultural Advisory Council (1999, 1-4). The second relates to the organisation of cultural markets themselves and their tendency to differentiate, segment and proliferate taste and status cultures. 6 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither The National Multicultural Advisory Council did not foreground the cultural assertiveness of newly empowered groups as in the Keating years, instead it focused on “social harmony”: the spaces between communities, on building bridges and developing solidarities among diverse communities. As an intercommunal policy, rights were, of course, still foregrounded, but so too were obligations and needs. Culture and cultural identity was increasingly being understood relationally—a matter to be judged on the basis of the quality and nature of the relations between individuals, and between groups of people. It follows from this that the gulf separating the different cultural orders of Australian society: rural and urban, indigenous and nonindigenous, Anglo-Celts and NESB communities requires bridges not the silos of separate warring solitudes. Partly a response to Hansonism and Aboriginal reconciliation, partly a response to emerging definitions of culture stressing its intensely relational character, this policy making required different sorts of instruments. Policy makers, politicians, foundations, and groups found them in various versions of cultural heritage whether in the new National Museum of Australia or the Queensland Heritage Trails Network (QHTN), in the projects of SBS Independent, the employment policies of cultural institutions and the regulation of broadcasters. Through such measures cultural division is to be addressed by directing and shaping the terms of cultural interaction. Cultural diversity here is all about recognising, sanctioning and organising inter-ethnic political identities. But what about the identities—subcultures, taste-cultures, value and lifestyles segments exploited and in many ways brought into being by commercial subsidised culture’s restless creation and exploitation of cultural and demographic differences? How do we reconcile the “political correctness”, “identity politics” and agendas of “governing differences” with the relentless production and reproduction of “difference” in the wider commercial culture and social, political and cultural life? In his study of the commercial drivers of segmentation and differentiation in the cultural system in America Joseph Turow (1997, 3) points to “the new portraits of society that advertisers and media personnel invoke involve the blending of income, generation, marital status, and gender into a soup of geographical and psychological profiles they call 'lifestyles'”. With the rise of segment-defined communication “small slices of society” are able to “talk to themselves” and construct more complete “worlds”. In circumstances where “taste and cultural style are important emblems of identity and sources of interpersonal information” (DiMaggio 2000, 48), 7 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither cultural production and consumption of all kinds become opportunities for organising relations of “cultural inclusion and exclusion between those who can, and those who cannot, exhibit the kinds of savoir faire that membership of a sub-culture requires” (Bennett et al 1999, 246). In these circumstances the institutional basis for common cultural symbols and systems of cultural authority is substantially weakened, and “weaker currencies” proliferate. For their part governments are increasingly recognising these “lifestyles”— to better target and deliver health campaigns and win elections. They are finding these “lifestyles” to be geo-demographic populations—particular demographies which are located in particular geographies. As election guru Jonathon Robbin (1980, 28) claims people “create or choose established neighbourhoods which conform to their lifestyle of the moment”. In this ways “the neighbourhood or community … make up a distinct social group which shares demographic and economic characteristics”. These are not only so many different cultural communities but also serve as the basis for claims for group recognition. Importantly such claims are not based on settled demographic features of age, gender and class or recognised cultural communities based on ethnicity, sexual orientation and the like—they are mixes of all of them. Joseph Turow (1997, 2) sees such segmentation and fragmentation dynamics as creating greater fear, less communication, less sense of cohesion and common purpose in various “equivalents of electronic gated communities”—in short becoming the basis for a different but no less potent version of social discord as any organised on bases of race, indigeneity or ethnicity. The “government of culture” faces not only the problem of ethnically- and racially-defined cultural diversity but also the diversities based on the increasing segmentation, fractioning and fragmentation dynamics of the broader society and commercial culture. In these circumstances cultural policy becomes important as governments seek to facilitate positive interaction—and even (re)formation—of identities in ways conducive to positive dialogue and the promotion of feasible harmony. Michael Schudson (1994, 42-3) captures this well when he writes: Culture may be integrative, but it may also be disintegrative at the same time. It may ally acquiescent citizens under a common regime and common symbols, but it may also prove a focal point for division, contention, and conflict. In their cultural policy nationstates provide less cultural unity than an authoritative statement of the terms in which union and division will be negotiated. 8 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither The tasks of “culture” in this sense are too big for cultural policy institutions like the Australia Council, the Department of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts (DoCITA), the ABC and SBS, and the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Cultural diversity instruments and agendas in the creative arts are part of broader policies of various government departments. One response has been, as in Canada, to commit to cultural diversity as an explicit “whole of government” priority. Certainly responsibility for cultural policy approaches to diversity are now widely distributed across different levels of government such that there are several “connections between cultural policy approaches to diversity and other social and cultural policy objectives” (Bennett, 2001, 31). Such policies obviously go beyond the immediate remit of arts and cultural ministries as cultural policy institutions are participating in and being shaped by larger logics. In this process culture has been substantially normalised. Towards a continuum of cultural production Over the thirty odd years from 1970 to 2001 “the high culture system” had eroded to such an extent that it was no longer sensible to talk of “high” and “low” as separate cultural orders—if anything they seemed interpenetrated, more a continuum than radically disjunct cultural zones. Excellence had been democratised and was now accepted as being found in any and every cultural form from country and western to opera; from comic art to contemporary dance to exploitation films. Consequently the “officially sanctioned culture of art galleries and museums no longer enjoyed universal or even widespread acceptance” and those who did not participate in these activities “do not experience this as a deprivation” (Bennett et al 1999, 246). Conservatoria of Music such as Griffith University’s have long since embarked on jazz music, music technology and more lately popular music programs alongside its traditional opera and classical instrumental programs. The so-called “high brow” consumers of high culture arts turned out increasingly to be “omnivores”: they consumed more of just about every kind of art—commercial and subsidised. This erosion was probably not the consequence of any shift towards cultural diversity and “community” focused policy perspectives. It was more a consequence of broader movements both within and outside the subsidised arts markets. The “new” concepts of culture emphasising multiplicities, inter-mixing, difference and relationality simply put into relief the already substantial reorganisation of the entire cultural field of commercial and subsidised arts as the gap between both systems narrowed. 9 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Paul DiMaggio (2000, 47-49) finds this narrowing at multiple levels. He finds it not only among consumers but in “the annexation of advertising and commercial arts styles and even objects into fine-arts compositions; in the emergence of performance art out of dramatic, circus, and vaudeville traditions; in the ever-thinning boundary between ballet and modern dance; in the production by opera companies of musical comedy”. The result of this movement at the level of both cultural production and cultural consumption is that our system of classification “of artistic goods is becoming more finely, but also less clearly, differentiated, less universal, and less symbolically potent”. “Aesthetic taste” no longer maps “isomorphically onto social strata”. Instead there is “stratification without segmentation” as “highly educated people are more likely to report going to movies and enjoying rock and rhythm-and-blues music”. It seemed that for them high culture facilitated their upward mobility whereas popular culture provided “the stuff of everyday sociability” (DiMaggio 1987b, 444). In such circumstances the arts sector starts to think of its audiences and its publics in the same way as do the commercial cultural industries: as significantly internally differentiated and segmented. Arts administrators started to locate several arts audiences segmented in terms of cultural background, location, age, income, education, occupation and gender. Differentiating the arts audiences became the means to develop effective promotion of both the value of arts and audience attendance at cultural venues and performances. Cultural organisations were bringing themselves into line with broader industrial practice within world consumer industries (see Peters, 1987, DiMaggio 1996, 176)—where “mass-market firms have shifted to product differentiation and the niche marketing of small-batch goods for discerning publics”. This made sense as arts organisations were operating in environments where tailored cultural services are the norm; where their “core” audiences were already being served in the majority of their cultural consumption through such strategies of differentiation; and where consumers use goods and services to “reflect distinctive self-fashioning personalities” (DiMaggio, 1996, 176). As their arts consumers are interested in and consume both high culture and popular-culture forms (DiMaggio, 1996, 163; Bennett et al 1999), the arts organisations therefore needed to understand the profiles— the various identities in aggregate terms—of their consumers and public (see Kirchberg 1999). The several strategies for arts promotion and management—strategic management, product differentiation, niche 10 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither marketing, consumer research—are each pragmatic instruments for delineating and delivering arts services to these various population profiles. Cultural policy agents enlisted marketing and management paradigms, soon those paradigms were shaping cultural policy making. The Australia Council, for instance, used the methodology of strategic management to develop its Planning for the Future (Australia Council 2001) discussion paper on issues, trends and opportunities for the various art forms and boards of the Australian Council. This turn to the market has been encouraged in Australia, the US and elsewhere by democratic logics of access, accountability and constituency formation. For DiMaggio (2000, 51-2) the logic of “access” pushed organisations to increase their audiences so they could demonstrate their relevance by the size of their publics—and this pushed them toward the market and toward marketing. Accountability in its turn linked institutional support “with nonartistic warrants of organisational virtue, such as marketing schemes, endowment policies, and strategic plans”. And finally there was a logic of “constituency formation” where arts organisations are being encouraged to grasp and understand themselves as a coherent sector— the cultural or creative industries—with duties and responsibilities for sectoral planning. Reflecting on the Australian and northern European experience David Throsby (2001, 146) suggests that cultural policy making now loosely rather than strongly superintends the field. With the increasing reliance on the market, corporate sponsorship and private patronage in arts organisations, the state has been able to retain “the capacity to manage cultural change by means of its cultural policies” but has reduced power to do so. These trends raise several problems for cultural policy making and its institutions which we are only beginning to identify and clarify. First there was the general problem: how can cultural policy and its institutions relate to differentiated and segmented populations, and increasingly differentiated cultural forms? How can cultural policy making equitably and strategically deal with the phenomenon of cultural proliferation? How can it relate to the various identities formed around and in relation to particular cultural forms and spheres of cultural consumption? Doesn’t it at the very least imply that cultural policy must come to terms, in Lisanne Gibson’s (2001, 119) words, “with the real diversity of cultural expression and participation”. 11 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither If neither “centralised cultural authority” nor “generalised cultural capital” are likely to “long remain in place” (DiMaggio 2000, 54) and may become as “decentralised in the arts and literature as in fashion and cuisine”(59) what kind of generalised rationale and logic can there be for the subsidised arts? The erosion of the high culture system certainly makes it harder to continue to justify distinguishing subsidised from commercial culture and arguing for one over the other. New candidates for support now contend for a share of the arguably diminishing cultural budget. (Why not support popular music—particularly given that it is the preferred cultural form of young people?). In these circumstances it becomes necessary to secure a sustainable rapprochement between commercial and subsidised cultural forms. Gibson (2001, 120), calls for “frameworks for the convergence of commercial and subsidised cultural forms in ways which are specifically aimed at achieving large-scale audience participation”. Others call for frameworks for growth and sustainability based on thoroughgoing interrogations of funding and support frameworks (Banking on Culture 2000). The turn to the “market” on the part of cultural organisations themselves also raises issues about the relation between the “for profit” and “not for profit” systems. The logic of a continuum of culture for audiences is increasingly requiring cultural policy makers to rethink the possibilities of the connections, relations and complementarities between subsidised and commercial culture and between culture and its various “complementers” in industry and business. Gibson (2001, 136) outlines some of the adjustments that would be necessary to give effect to this “turn” in her calling for a repositioning of youth programs and policy in ways which would “equitably manage and facilitate production and participation in cultural forms which is informed by a plural engagement with the actual cultural forms which populations produce and consume and the utility of these forms to cultural and industrial development”. This implies even more differentiated approaches characterised by improvisation. It could, for instance, entail “partnerships with commercial cultural organisations” which would “allow government and non-profit organisations to retain focus on the ‘public interest’ components of their missions” (Gibson, 2000, 126-7). This is a logic of cultural development in which the unit of thinking shifts from the individual or the organisation and towards the relations characterising the whole sector. Here forms of cultural planning assume a critical role. 12 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Cultural Development—Sustainable Communities The thrust of this broadening out and encapsulating of culture as a matter for planning and strategy by the whole of government, was promoted through UNESCO under the auspices of its World Decade for Cultural Development. For UNESCO cultural development was a fundamental plank in social and community well-being. When culture is connected to social and economic well-being it is too important to be left to “cultural agencies”. As UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development in 1998 (12-13) put it: The World Decade for Cultural Development stressed the importance of acknowledging the cultural dimension of development; asserting and enhancing cultural identities; broadening participation in cultural life; and promoting international cultural cooperation. In this view “sustainable development and the flourishing of culture are interdependent”. UNESCO’s seminal Our Creative Diversity (The World Commission on Culture and Development, 1995) noted that “when culture is understood as the basis of development the very notion of cultural policy has to be considerably broadened”. The broadened focus shifts the fulcrum of attention onto sustainable communities which are in turn built around identities. The World Bank is now just one of several multilateral organisations beginning to discuss development paradigms in cultural terms (Wallach, 2000, 8). Cultural planning and place The international agenda for the extended scope of cultural policies has a significant Brisbane connection. Writing in a recent publication of the Council of Europe, Lia Ghilardi (2001, 120) celebrates Brisbane’s cultural development strategy as a key moment in the development of cultural planning. It was the “first attempt to develop a truly culturally inclusive framework”. This strategy was developed by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies (ICPS) at Griffith University and authored by Colin Mercer and Tony Bennett. What is significant about cultural planning is that it was a “new approach to cultural policy” which promised a “more integrated approach to cultural development in contemporary urban settings” (Ghilardi, 2001, 116). As Lia Ghilardi recently put it: 13 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither By linking culture and other aspects of economic and social life, cultural planning can be instrumental in creating development opportunities for the whole of the local community.(118). The planning encounter brings into relation arts, media, heritage, sports, leisure, and environment policy making. Cultural planning was changing the kinds of outcomes desired by policy making and potentially delivering a greater spread of positive developments. As Tony Bennett (2001, 50) astutely contends: “[t]he more these fuse with and inform each other, the more cultural policies will deliver a differentiated range of outcomes for a wider range of constituencies”. Such thinking moves beyond the “traditional” cultural policy focus on supporting producers and the production of particular art forms and instead thinks in terms of a larger palate of cultural and non-cultural forms in particular places, spaces and territories. This is the role of the “cultural industries”, “heritage” and “creativity” in the social and economic life of neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations. Planning for urban regeneration and cultural and leisure precinct developments routinely attempt to organise a diverse cultural and leisure field into complementary and synergistic relationships. In Brisbane, for example, this field comprises existing and new botanical gardens, (redeveloped), sporting arenas, convention centres, new and existing galleries, museums, performing arts centres, cinemas, outdoor performance spaces, swimming pools/beaches, restaurants, walking trails and education facilities either on or close to the South Bank precinct. Such planning is about helping “urban governments identify the cultural resources of a city or locality and to apply them in a strategic way to achieve key objectives in areas such as community development, place marketing or industrial development” (Ghilardi, 2001, 119). Cultural policy making is becoming part of larger schemes to both rejuvenate “down town” and the city as a whole. In this encounter cultural agencies and policy makers are having to transform their horizons and intersect with town planning, city development, city branding and creative city and incubator agendas and vice versa. In the process cultural policy is becoming at the service of (rather than superintending) city, precinct and leisure planning. Charles Landry (2000) and others now promote to governments internationally various “creative” or “learning city” paradigms. Writing of such planning in England’s north Landry (2000, 227) identifies the planning objective as being one of creating “a place that tangibly enriches talented 14 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither individuals and provides opportunities for them to turn concepts into products, thereby helping Huddersfield become a wealth-creating town”. Its initial focus is to “bring about a linkage between arts, arts and cultural creativity and technological creativity” from which “so many future goods and services will be generated”. Later the focus is “to broaden to include environmental and social innovations”. The cultural planning increasingly adopted by city councils is about “place making”, encouraging cultural tourism, cultural industry capacity building as well as sustainability and social justice. “Culture” becomes a way of thinking and organising the framework for the inevitable trade-off between developers and the community. Sometimes this coordinating and planning work is undertaken out of cultural policy institutions and frameworks and sometimes it might not involve them at all. In the former case cultural planning processes coordinate city or region cultural, heritage and leisure instruments while building connections with the commercial arts-related industries and “arts” complementers. Sue Bowden of Australia Street has now done cultural planning exercises of this nature for Wollongong and more lately the Gold Coast City Council. Where cultural planning is taken up and implemented out of other usually the economic sections of council or state government the “creative city” or “smart state” is acquiring a slightly different spin. It is likely to be a “top down” initiative where logics of sustainability become community and prosperity building through (new) industry development and employment agendas. Here “creativity” and creative capacity-building are related to the position of a city or a region in relation to other cities in the context of the “knowledge/information/network” society. There are benefits and opportunities to be derived from positively harnessing convergence and communication and information technologies. What is being envisaged here is a way of connecting previously separate social, economic and cultural priorities: urban and rural renewal, their sustainable development, and the realization of ambitions for a “smart”, “intelligent” state or networked “creative city”. Philip Schlesinger recently suggested (at the Television conference in Brisbane in December 2000) that such policy agendas depend on the perceived need to think about the competitiveness of nations, regions and cities vis-à-vis others as a primary problem for government in a globalising environment. As a result of explicitly pursuing “place” competitiveness governments at all levels were increasingly conceiving the variety of their communications, 15 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither cultural and creative resources as sources for competitive (and therefore comparative) advantage. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the impetus for this policy development is not coming from the traditional arts/media portfolios of government. It is often coming out of industry development and trade and enterprise portfolios. In this configuration culture is appreciated as a set of dynamic, inter-related resources capable of rearrangement and rearticulation into formidable networks. This is about facilitating positive and substantial change in the attitude to and purpose of “creativity” on the part of the big and small ends of town, both the developers and the cultural workers who need to be brought into the loop. In this form of cultural planning the cultural policy institutions and cultural industry actors are somewhat marginalised; just as likely to be brought in later into an already settled process. Cultural planning as sectoral rethinking and coordination The “cultural planning” moment is more than coordinating the various cultural activities and capacities of “places”. It is also about connecting and building cultural capacity through a sustained and positive rethinking of both funding instruments and the relations among the various bits of the cultural sector. This has taken two identifiably different directions: in one it is about planning for system-wide adjustments in the funding and government of culture to make individuals and organisations more responsive to opportunities; in the other it is about effectively exploiting the synergies among the various cultural forms in various “cultural industries” or “creative industries” models. Cultural policy making is beginning a systemic re-examination of the costs and benefits of its funding and corporate instruments and seeking alternative funding regimes, business and governance models for cultural activity. Such re-thinking driven as it is by stagnating funding and a desire to grow the sector and the incomes of arts workers involves moving beyond the “traditional” cultural policy focus on supporting producers and the production of particular art forms and instead thinks in terms of a larger palate of interventions. One emphasis has been to focus on developing among cultural workers a generic entrepreneurialism. Turning micro businesses into small to medium sized enterprises is not only a rational response to stagnating government funding, it is also a pragmatic response to the already existing horizontal career structure of existing cultural workers. As Lisanne Gibson (2001, 130) 16 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither drawing on the work of Pat Wise and Gillian Swanson (1995, 1) notes “many artists … cross-subsidise their ‘traditional’ art practice by working across a range of practice forms”. In these circumstances the artist is often “simultaneously self-employed, employed and an entrepreneur” (Walker 1997, 5; cited in Gibson 2001, 130). In these circumstances artists are not being turned into business people—they are already running cultural businesses—they are being targeted for help to grow their cultural businesses. Such attention applies strategic management and business development thinking to the cultural sector. David Paynter, speaking recently at an international arts management conference in Brisbane, identified the central task as one of finding arts’ “complementers”—the industries like the wine industry which complement arts activity. Paynter’s (see 2001) own work on re-establishing Meadowbank Wine label in Hobart involved creating complementarities between wine industry tourism and various visual and performing arts including film programs on site. A large scale “complementer” focus can be seen at work in Queensland’s public art policy. This per cent for art policy requires a proportion of the government expenditure on new public buildings to go to public artworks. It is designed to develop the relationship between artists and those who build and commission public buildings. It is also an “incubator” strategy designed to connect and kick-start creativity in Qld design and manufacturing processes. The artworkers involved are now required to think of themselves as small businesses right down to worrying about public liability insurance and figuring out how to make partnerships with architectural firms and manufacturers work. This is both a cultural policy initiative and a smart state initiative undertaken in the context of a public works program. The search for alternatives to existing and sometimes rigid corporate forms for major cultural institutions like museums and galleries is leading to experimentation in corporate governance. Throsby (2001, 46) notes how it increasingly makes sense for these institutions to be disconnected “from total public ownership and control” and for the scope of cultural policy to shift “towards a more open and flexible exercise of fiscal and regulatory responsibility by the state”. He notes how national museums and galleries in Holland have become independent, autonomous business units. While the state retains ownership of buildings and collections, and continues to fund them “on agreed terms”, their management is freed to be “more flexible, responsive, dynamic and entrepreneurial in the operation of the facilities and in the delivery of the services to the public”. 17 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Cultural industries/creative industries The second and perhaps more familiar route cultural planning has taken has been to think beyond the horizon line of a particular cultural industry (like theatre or television) or cluster of such industries (the performing arts, the audio-visual sector) to apprehend the multifaceted relations among what has been variously called the arts-related (Guldberg 2000) or “cultural industries” (Throsby 2001). The cultural industries in Australian policy making and Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) calculations are taken to include not only the commercial and subsidised creative arts but also libraries, museums and, for the ABS, botanical gardens and zoos. For cultural policy making this began as an agenda of coordinating and integrating these various industries into so many related “cultural industries” of Australia’s first national cultural policy Creative Nation (DOCA, 1994). Creative Nation assembled the diverse bits of the governmental cultural support system and thought the relations and possible synergies among this diverse palate. This was a concern to cohere the national cultural infrastructure and to connect it with the commercial cultural industries. This was a model for a certain kind of rapprochement between the subsidised and unsubsidised culture which acknowledged the diversity of cultural forms, the importance of better connecting diverse governmental programs and building connections between these programs and the commercial cultural industries for national (economic and cultural) benefit. “Cultural industries” policy logics were a strategic intervention in how the sector represented and thought about itself—the “arts” and “media” industries were becoming a recognisable, tangible and measurable sector to be set alongside other industrial sectors. Through the idea of the cultural industries, members of the sector were encouraged to recognise themselves as a part of a larger field, to assess their own sector’s standing in this field, and to form constituencies to collectively lobby governments and politicians. For their part, governments and the broader public now had a box within which to put several governmental initiatives ranging from support to artists, art forms, libraries, zoos, botanical gardens, museums, galleries, performance centres, film studios, the ABC and SBS. With ABS’s cultural statistics confirming that “cultural activity makes a significant contribution to the economy … bigger (in the Australian case at least) than beer and footwear” (Throsby 2001, 111), the cultural industries were becoming identified as economically significant industries with large public participation. 18 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither This cultural industries modelling entered national cultural policy through cultural policy frameworks and institutions. Unsurprisingly these frameworks initially placed the “arts” at the centre of the cultural industries even though their size and output was smaller than that of the art-related commercial cultural industries. David Throsby (2001, 112), a Sydney economist who has built up an international reputation modelling the relation between economics and culture reported recently on the cultural industries model used in Australia and elsewhere. He identified it as a concentric circle model with “the arts lying at the centre”, the other industries formed “layers” around this core and “extending further outwards as the use of creative ideas is taken into a wider production context”. At the core was “the creative arts as traditionally defined: music, dance, theatre, literature, the visual arts, the crafts, and including newer forms of practice such as video art, performance art, computer and multimedia art and so on” (112); the next circle layered outside this core were “those industries whose output qualifies as cultural commodity … but where other noncultural goods and services are also produced, such that the proportion of … primary cultural goods and services is relatively lower than in the core arts case”. This area includes book and magazine publishing, television and radio, newspapers and film (113). And finally there were those ‘industries which “operate essentially outside the cultural sphere but some of whose product could be argued to have some degree of cultural content”. These industries included the advertising, tourism, architectural services and design industries. (113) This model was pursued by various state and federal arts agencies over the late 1980s and 1990s. Developed by and for the arts sector to both justify itself as a constituency to government and to manage an engagement with the commercial cultural industries, this model privileges the “arts” part of the “cultural industries” as an indispensable base and originating point. The subsidised and commercial cultural industries are envisaged here as sitting side-by-side and accommodating each other as the basis for partnerships. If this is the commercial cultural industries on the terms of the arts and traditional cultural policy priorities, it is also a model which recognises the role of the subsidised arts in the research and development for the commercial cultural industries. These cultural industries frameworks were inevitably concerned with better cohering subsidised and un-subsidised culture. Over time the combination of national cultural policy frameworks and routine collection of data for the cultural industries allowed diverse actors to 19 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither scope the connection between these subsidised fields and the broader “commercial” cultural industries of advertising, design, craft, broadcasting and film. This was an attempt to turn the various capabilities of these industries into a larger and value-added capacity in the “creative industries”. Varieties of “creative industries” policy making emerged organised on “industry development” principles looking to better coordinate and build something larger from the dispersed base of both the “subsidised” arts and the “arts-related” industries, particularly the latter (Creative Industries Task Force 1998). With the emphasis placed upon commercial and economic development, a distance was necessarily taken from the previous cultural industries focus which started from what governments fund or part-fund and then worked outwards to the commercial cultural industries. With this shift in the centre of analysis and attention, the “subsidised” culture became a somewhat less important, peripheral industry development priority. The “arts-related” industries of Throsby’s middle and outer circles were becoming the core with the subsidised sector at the periphery. Given the size and scope of the arts-related industries the subsidised culture made up a sub-set of creative industry policy frameworks. Both the existing “subsidised” and commercial culture alike became of interest here for the “resources”—of people, skills, talent and practice forms—they could provide for building enhanced capacity. Such resources were to be harnessed, redirected, refashioned via a commercial and entrepreneurial spirit in an ever widening “commercial applications” of creativity that involved much more than the existing commercial and subsidised cultural sectors. “Creative industries” policymaking is perhaps best considered as a species of thinking the cultural industries within an emerging “services framework” (see DoCITA 2000). There are at least three different but interconnected models for constructing and paving the way for the development of “arts’ or “culture” as a service for other sectors and industries. There is an explicit arts-services model where arts’ complementers are sought in various public and private partnerships such as Qld’s public art program. There is a synergy model espoused in the UK creative industries document where grounds are sought between the subsidized and commercial culture and where each is valued for its contribution to a vital arts services sector. This is clearly about rebadging and reconfiguring “cultural industries” programs and emphases in new ways to accommodate changing governmental logics of state emphasising capacity building, sustainable development and cross-sectoral 20 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither partnerships. And there is a new and emerging industries model which is connected with the “place” competitiveness paradigms mentioned earlier. This is the model currently being pursued in Qld through State Development and is currently being extended into a state-wide strategy. This last “creative industries” model explicitly configures culture as a service industry and creativity an application. To an extent this policy making is a response to wider governmental deliberations about the “new economy” represented by convergence and globalisation. A 1998 OECD Working Party on the Information Economy Report Content as a New Growth Industry helped set a powerful agenda when it observed that changes in the forms and terrains of content production and in the organisation of the production infrastructure have had a number of global effects. They have broken down the boundaries between textual, audio, and visual services, expanded the possibilities for market development, and “broadened the range of economic interests concerned with how the value of intellectual content can be realised under different market and regulatory conditions” (OECD 1998, 6). Policy making must find ways to respond to the new mobility of capital, personnel and production impelled by developments in transmission or distribution technologies, by the new commercial organisation of the industry, and by the growing recognition at commercial and government levels of the potential of information, communication and ecommerce industries to ensure future prosperity. In such circumstances “creativity” was becoming of central concern for a range of policy making bodies interested in facilitating city, state and national adjustments to the new circumstances and opportunities convergence and globalisation represents. The unit for policy making attention resolutely shifts to the whole of the arts-related and arts industries (and not just the subsidised arts areas) and deals with them for their potential to engage with and take advantage of the several opportunities available for emerging industries and likely reconfigurations of existing ones. The convergence of previously separated industries seems to be creating different “applications” of ideas from smart buildings to software, from games to new kinds of display and design alongside film, television, and the internet. Policy making in these circumstances can not be about encouraging cultural production in particular cultural forms. Instead it should be explicitly “platform” neutral as a means of encouraging the several opportunities provided by multiple platforms and their necessarily unexpected combinations. This thinking has given rise to 21 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither the development of film and television related instruments in Scotland, for example, which encourage the independent film and television production industry to translate themselves through and take advantage of the opportunities for film and television expertise afforded by the new media platforms and applications (see Schlesinger 2000). This could take the form of games design, web-television and e-commerce, or in the “intangible” exhibits that increasingly dominated trade shows, museums and galleries. Based on thinking coming out of strategic management paradigms the idea is to re-engineer the capabilities of each of the “silo like” arts-related industries into something larger than the sum of the various parts. In the creative industries policy making, particularly as it has developed in Brisbane over the past twenty-four months through a strategic partnership between State Development and QUT the definition of creative industries is one of the “commercial application of creativity”. As currently articulated this model has the traditional arts and their venues making only a small footprint into the creative industries. Given the “smart state” and employment growth upon new venture and entrepreneurial development, the emphasis is instead on growing “new economy” micro businesses into small-medium sized businesses and facilitating small-medium sized businesses to grow. Of particular importance in realising these efforts are various incubator and precinct instruments. It is not that subsidised culture is being impugned by such frameworks, it is not. It is simply irrelevant unless it proves itself otherwise. Such policy making poses questions about the relation between this new policy making and existing cultural policy instruments and sectors. How is the balance between the new and the old media—the new “digital” media and old economy forms of the performing arts, film, television, pay-TV and so on—to be struck? Isn’t there a danger that the lines will be perhaps too sharply drawn and miss the continuum of old and new—and to miss the opportunities within “the old”? Similarly how can an appropriate balance be struck between subsidized and commercial culture? Isn’t there a risk that the enthusiasm for the new and the commercial might disrupt the nature and character of the ecology of the two—particularly the extent to which the notfor-profit area acts as research and development for the commercial area such that “the commercial area is subsidized by the not-for-profit area” (Campbell, 2000, 143). In these circumstances the subsidized arena may be valued and justified for all the wrong reasons: either as an unfocused training ground (requiring focus through the development of creative 22 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither industries faculties) or as something so different and indifferent to commerce and new media as to amount to two different cultural orderings. Both cultural industry and creative industry policy making provide another clear instance of a major shift in the environments of cultural policy making. Cultural policy ideas are now likely to be taken up as part of wider national, state, city or regional development programs and translated through these. Both kinds of policy making encourage cross-sectoral partnerships represented by various kinds of infrastructural development which have included precincts and in the case of the Keating government’s national cultural policy the Fox film studio development. These are clearly part of a larger change in the management, direction and focus of cultural support. Cultural development is being twinned with industry capacity building with the latter threatening the former’s dominance of the field. The example of the creative industries shows that even in the domain of “creativity” the close attribute of the “arts”, policy making is no longer being carried out by arts-based cultural policy institutions but by other actors and agents. Even “creativity” seemed too important to be left up to cultural policy institutions and frameworks. The problem of “too little” culture At the same time as there seems to be “too much” culture there is an equally important experience of there being “too little” of it. Many in the arts and media sector—and this is very clear in the Australian film and television production sector—feel that cultural policy advances are under threat and being wound back. In film policy the previously unassailed focus on cultural development sits uneasily with the industry development and capacity building priorities represented by studios, runaway productions and coproductions. The push to liberalise global trade which gathered pace in the early 1990s also has impacted on national cultural policy making potentially restricting the kind and character of instruments capable of being applied. Industry development and cultural development Because cultural policy making has traditionally been concerned with fostering and supporting the production of cultural materials by domestic creators, these new instruments have slackened the focus on cultural producers and artists and instead concentrated attention to processes, practices and production often within a framework of cross-sectoral 23 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither partnerships. In this shift the “product” has been eclipsed by the audio-visual services being provided. By implication evaluation is to be done on the basis of skills development, employment indicators and technological capacity— and not the quality of the “product” itself. The cultural policy concerns in film and television have been with developing production support structures for the creation of individual film and television programs and regulatory structures designed to mandate levels of local content on free-to-air television. These concerns are addressed through the work of three interlocking agencies—the film support agencies (such as the Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Commission), the Australian Broadcasting Authority, and the two national broadcasters—and are articulated in various cultural and social objectives provisions of the film agencies, relevant broadcasting acts, and the charters of public service broadcasters. In film and television as in other commercial spheres the tendency has been to devolve public cultural responsibilities to the market, and to develop self- or co-regulatory media regimes (O’Regan & Goldsmith 2001). 1 Cultural policy is therefore in a new relation with the fluid hierarchy of policy priorities which organise the overall attentions of government. In many countries governments’ commitments to the direct and indirect support of cultural production as cultural production have fluctuated in line with broader domestic or international policy agendas. While the rhetorics of cultural development are still deployed in film policy, it has been lifted perhaps higher than ever before out of the zone of cultural objectives, and in to the zone of economic models and multiplier effects. With the emphasis as likely to be on capacity building, professionalisation and skills development, often associated with infrastructural developments such as studios, cultural policy objectives and rationales remain but seem to be bent for use in new contexts and made to fit with broader policy agendas privileging jobs growth, and industrial development. The resurgent interest in the “studio idea” in Australia and internationally seems to owe itself to a sense that it is a means to secure the future of production industries, to generate additional domestic capacity and ensure that local filmmaking milieux remain technologically competitive. The logic of capacity building 1 The analysis developed here draws extensively on O'Regan & Goldsmith 2001. 24 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither focuses on the skills acquisition of differentiated film workers and problematizes the “creative” focus on an Australian filmmaking. As Goldsmith, Thomas, O’Regan and Cunningham (2001, 74) have noted in relation to Australian broadcasting policy these “infrastructure” priorities have led to an “unproductive dichotomy” between “the cultural dimensions of broadcasting, the commercial interests of the industry and the economic benefits of a more liberal approach”. The problem is that the cultural is set “against industry development and digital economy priorities”. As we noted “there are circumstances in which these priorities may be in conflict” but there is no reason “to presume that these priorities should always be counterposed”. In a growing, more competitive and more dynamic industry, cultural and economic benefits may well coincide. We conclude that in this area the cultural and social objectives of broadcasting remain as important as ever—promoting the availability of services; developing a competitive, responsive industry; encouraging diversity in control of broadcasting services; developing Australian culture, quality and innovation; providing fair, accurate and appropriate coverage; and protecting children and respecting community standards (Goldsmith et al 2001, 8-12). But we may need new instruments to deliver these cultural outcomes in converging media systems. International Treaties In Australia as in many other countries, regulation of audiovisual media and particularly of free to air television is born out of a sense of their potential for social and cultural influence and a desire to channel that influence in ways which support Australian cultural production and make Australian audiovisual material available to Australian viewers and audiences. But such arguments do not sit comfortably with the push to liberalise global trade which gathered pace in the early 1990s. National cultural policy instruments are coming under increasing pressure to reach “cultural accommodations … owing to the growing influence of both larger regional economic formations and international policy and legislative jurisdictions” (Bennett 2001 53). Recent decisions in trade disputes between Canada and the US over periodicals, and between Australia and New Zealand over television programming have shown what impact trade treaties can have on domestic media policymaking and regulation and brought in to question the capacity of national governments to make beneficial policy (see Goldsmith et al 2001, 22-27). With culture and cultural industries once again becoming the 25 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither focus of attention at the World Trade Organisation, national and international efforts to establish positions, and to test the potential boundaries and consequences of national commitments are becoming more pressing. This is happening at a time when it is uncertain just what is possible or desirable for governments to do in an environment characterised by convergence of media products and markets; media platforms; corporate structures; and media regulation and policy (see Productivity Commission 2000: 105-23 for elaboration of these categories of potential convergence). With negotiations moving forward on the development of a free trade treaty between the US and Australia the Americans' longstanding concern to set limits to cultural activism will once more test Australian resolve. The character and direction of WTO and domestic court decisions and the stance of the Office of the US Trade Representative suggest that the scope for beneficial policy making may need to be adjusted in ways which match cultural objectives to unequivocally cultural instruments. Instruments such as employment provisions which stipulate, for example, the employment of key creative personnel in creative positions might, for example, be problematic as these smack of industry protection whereas the much maligned “look and feel test” the Broadcasting Tribunal toyed with and subsequently abandoned in the late 1980s might have a better chance of standing up to scrutiny as its cultural rationale is more tightly connected to policy instruments. Convergence and mega-mergers The production landscape is also fundamentally changing with the further convergence of technology, mergers between large media players, new economic arrangements and technological innovation. These developments are making it harder for existing cultural policy instruments to work as effectively as in the past. For industries like Australia’s which historically have carefully tried to manage the interface between the domestic and international film industry by balancing industrial growth and development against the protection and promotion of cultural identity and diversity, the potential impacts of changing patterns of content production internationally are enormous and worrying. Shifts in the global media industry towards massive vertically integrated conglomerates are impacting on local production activity (see O’Regan & Goldsmith 2001). As the Audio Visual Production Industry Group noted in its submission to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Public 26 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Consultations on Further Multilateral Trade Negotiations in June 1999, these conglomerates will conceivably act as both client and customer to small, independent production companies. If the success of domestic content creators in a fragmented media environment is increasingly dependent on their ability to exploit to the full the rights in their intellectual property across multiple windows, the mega-mergers create companies which embody such horizontal and vertical integration that it becomes difficult for unaffiliated product to exploit the value chain from any position of strength. To take advantage of a program’s full value, content creators will need to be able to share in the benefits of multiple exploration of their program or film. But control of the new bottlenecks ensure that distribution networks are primarily at the disposal of their own integrated production, distribution and exhibition systems across media platforms. Unattached Australian film and television producers are being affected by changes in market and government interest in filmmaking. In these circumstances the scope for cultural policy making has conceivably narrowed and policy makers remain uncertain as to the very future of “local production” in the face of these developments. While “dreaming our own dreams and telling our own stories” still has valence Australian policy makers have moved from being solely interested in Australian film and television production to also being interested in film and television made in Australia as a means of being able to take advantage of global markets and fragmented market opportunities. The problem facing cultural policy and the domestic production industry alike was well encapsulated by the European Union’s High Level Group on Audio-Visual Policy (1998, 6): At the heart of the matter is the question of whether the predicted explosion in demand for audiovisual material will be met by European productions or by imports. The European audiovisual market is already fragmented, due to linguistic and cultural diversity. The danger is that the channel proliferation brought about by digital technology will lead to further market fragmentation, making it even more difficult for European producers to compete with American imports. This question with its very real consideration that perhaps local content creators might not be able to take advantage of an explosion of demand increasingly haunted film policy makers and filmmakers. While all could identify the problem as one of maximising the opportunities and minimising the threats to local industries and local content creators of a more diverse, 27 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither fragmented and expanding audio-visual industry, there were no clear ideas either nationally or internationally about the best instruments for delivering a workable solution. There was broad consensus that the old instruments, like domestic content regulations and production support, may no longer be working but no clear idea about what to replace them with. Increasingly more audio-visual services seemed to compromise the capacity for cultural policy making. In all these instances "too little culture' turns out to be as much a problem for existing cultural policy instruments as a problem of the declining importance of cultural policy rationales. While it is not clear what these new instruments will look like, or indeed whether in some cases any effective instruments may be developed, cultural rationales look like remaining of considerable importance. On too much and too little culture As we have seen the process of expanding the remit of culture initially came out of the major cultural policy institutions themselves. But we have now moved from the enunciation of principles and the winning of the argument for these principles to their implementation. “Culture” has been substantially normalised on a variety of governmental horizons with unpredictable consequences and uneven implementation. With this has come a variety of improvisations—some of which marginalise both cultural policy institutions and their longstanding production support instruments. But what has happened is precisely what cultural policy makers were arguing for in the early and mid-1990s. Because culture mattered it was everybody’s business—a matter for the whole of government. I think those of us involved in cultural policy formation and cultural policy studies failed to recognise the consequences of success. We failed to recognise that we were asking other institutions, other departments, other sectors not to be enlisted for us, but to enlist us for their purposes. Culture was being made part of their not just our agenda. They were thinking with and thinking through culture and the result is a series of developments which substantially wrests the control of cultural policy from cultural policy institutions and their agendas to the instruments and agendas of other bodies and frameworks. The longer this process occurs and the more experience there is in implementing and evaluating cultural perspectives in government, the more 28 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither the cultural turn becomes caught up in, determined by and transformed through these larger governmental plays increasingly whole of government, economic and regional development focussed. And this has another consequence for those involved in cultural policy—for the ways we understand ourselves and connect with other spheres. Cultural policy and by implication cultural policy studies is becoming less its own sui generis domain and more part of a variety of other governmental processes, spheres, knowledges and domains. It is becoming transformed in a number of spheres through its participation in these spheres. Their rhetorics, larger agendas, larger priorities are inflecting how cultural policy makers think of themselves. In these several encounters with industry, regional development, strategic management, public policy, cultural policy risks losing not only a sense of common identity of purpose and orientation but also its sense of its own coordinating and facilitating role. The rhetorical question I began with “rejuvenate or wither” is revealed as just that. Cultural policy dimensions on the evidence provided in this lecture have become more, not less important in the intervening period between Australia’s “cultural policy moment” of Creative Nation in the mid-1990s. It is just that the “action” is no longer principally “cultural policy”—specific action. It is a generalised agenda of cultural policy in “the context of …”. Within the arts it is a matter of the “arts and … business, environment, cultural diversity, the commercial cultural industries and so on”. This does not mean that the central cultural policy institutions are withering away. The Australia Council, the Australian Broadcasting Authority and Arts Queensland all remain in place and are doing valuable work. But it means they will need to redefine themselves and their roles. At the same time there is also evidence of the setting of limits to culture— particularly in the audio-visual services area and possibly beyond. There is no doubt market fragmentation, interactivity and global film and television markets are affecting and making difficult and even unworkable present instruments for securing cultural and social policy objectives. But there are also various instruments through which cultural policy objectives could be served in these new environments (see Goldsmith et al 2001). There are limits being set to culture but these are happening in the context of a dizzying proliferation of cultural zones. As culture and creativity become more not less important to government cultural policy is not withering away. It does however need to change to meet new circumstances and challenges—it needs to embrace an agenda of 29 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither rejuvenation marked by differentiated strategies, knowledges, sites and outcomes. Implications for cultural policy studies When a programmatics for cultural policy studies internationally was being formulated at this University in the early 1990s the relationship with an emerging field of cultural studies was its epicentre. As my predecessor, Tony Bennett saw it this relationship not only resided in “making cultural studies useful” but was a pragmatic response to the circumstance of “virtually all forms of culture” now being “capable of being fashioned into vehicles for government programs of one sort or another”. The object of the investigation was to be the “emergence of the wider domain of the ‘cultural’ as a field of social management” (1992, 397). The logic of my lecture is that cultural policy development is moving in directions which require cultural policy studies to transform itself in ways which take it beyond cultural and media studies as presently conceived. In response cultural policy studies is opening up to other “disciplines” including intellectual property, administrative and international law, political science, public policy, economics, sociology, art history, strategic management and international relations, gender studies, leisure sport and recreation studies, tourism and town planning. Cultural policy studies is getting as dispersed as the sites cultural policy making is taking place in. With this dispersion comes the imperative for diverse sets of disciplinary engagements. As culture’s web grows this will inevitably imply a greater fragmentation of cultural policy studies. But it is precisely in these diverse disciplinary engagements that cultural policy studies will be productively rejuvenated. Cultural policy studies is also centrally concerned with making sense of the “culturalist turn” in government, politics and social orders. Right from its Griffith University incarnation cultural policy studies has regarded culture as problem of government. The object of the various inquiries of Bennett (1998) and Hunter (1988) were not to celebrate culture but to query its emergence as a concept and practice of government. Now more than ever, cultural policy studies can not lose sight of the priority to interrogate this culturalist turn. Virginia Dominguez (2000, 21) has recently re-stated this priority in the American context: 30 Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither Culture stays with us but not, I shall argue, because it is simply part of life. Rather, because we think and act in terms of it, and we make strategic social and political interventions by invoking it. For Dominguez anthropologists, cultural policy activists and cultural policy analysts alike should be in the business of investigating “culturalism” defined as the “propensity to employ culture (to think, act, and fight with it)” (21). Here the central question to be answered is: “why is cultural something of value?” and its corollary “why does so much cultural politics around the world stop short of asking that question?” What does it mean when difference is increasingly transformed into “culturalised” difference (30)? Given that “much of the world has internalised culture as a marker of difference”, what consequences does this have? What is the culture of cultural policy? Answering these urgent questions requires a rigorously agnostic take on the “culturalist turn”. It entails asking fundamental questions about the use of culture and being prepared to think culture differently. 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